postcards of the hanging

Month: September 2014

Camden Town, ladies and gentleman. There’s no way to properly describe Camden, it’s just Camden. It’s grimy and tacky and great, and vibrant and awful and touristy and local and rough and everything, it is Camden and can be everything at once. Everyone in north London has their own Camden I think. I for one have a lot of personal history around here, nights out, days about, the odd gig, too many night buses, a good few birthdays, and of course my stag party. I haven’t sketched much around here, so I wanted to do a bit while I was back. I chose the Regents Canal, specifically Camden Lock, well Hampstead Road Lock. I stood, with the sun shining, and sketched the lock, as far as I could. I didn’t do any colour except the red cross of the flag. The clouds were rolling in, oh big black clouds, scary looking but not enough to stop me. And then, whoah, massive thunderstorm, super heavy rain – good job I got the ink done, because this rain was stupendous. People dashing about like mad things, and I took shelter in a doorway. When I added the colour later I left it as the luscious N1 summer blue sky, pre-tempest.
This is the Dublin Castle pub on Parkway, Camden Town. It is approximately 1994. No no, wait, it’s 2014, I got confused there. It’s easy to get confused, it hasn’t changed in the slightest. Well, maybe the price of beer. Anyway, I arrived soaking wet, having run through the rainstorm from Camden Lock (see the handy map below to figure out my route), to see if this old haunt had gone the way of the so many London pubs – gentrified, sanitized, or worse, closed. Thankfully it was still the same, though being the daytime it was practically empty. I got a beer (actually wasn’t expensive, for London) and sat and sketched the red interior. As I was sketching the big ‘Madness’ poster, I heard a guy talking to a woman at the bar whose voice was familiar, and it was in fact Suggs himself, the Madness singer. Now he does have a long association with this pub and this area (here’s his ode to the area) but still it was fun seeing him in there, briefly, especially as I was drawing his poster (he’s on the tube-sign one next to it too). Oh, this old place, many evenings were spent in here, back in the 90s and early 00s. Playing the Who on the jukebox. Talking Serbian poetry with students from Belgrade. Watching very serious unheard-of bands while surrounded by record company band-scouts. Getting my drink knocked vertically across the bar by bouncers steaming past quickly to conclude a fight. Dancing to Anarchy in the UK while my friend Tel threw up in the toilets. Yep, there’s a lot of social history in a place like this. I sketched here until the sun came out, before heading back to Burnt Oak for dinner.

Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Pence Gallery’s annual art Auction, as one of the contributing artists. The wealth of amazing work on display was amazing, as always. The Pence is a great place and they work tirelessly to promote excellence in local art. I met a lot of nice people there, and really enjoyed watching the auction. I sketched at the back, stood next to the dessert table (wow, amazing chocolates!). The auctioneer is very humourous, and very god at getting the crowd to buy art (though every time he said “going once, going twice,” I really wanted to say “c’mon baby don’t be cold as ice…”) This is the third year in a row I’ve sketched it, and I think I’ve captured it now. Below, the view from the patio outside. A very warm night, people talking, art-lovers buying, music playing. One of my favourite spots in Davis. Oh, and both my pieces sold! I honestly hadn’t expected them to this time (I’ve sold my pieces in the previous three years) so I was pretty buoyed, and went home pretty happy. I had been coaching my son’s U7 soccer team (the Red Foxes) that afternoon, it had been a good game, so all in all a pretty nice Saturday. Many thanks to Natalie Nelson and the good people at the Pence for inviting me to take part and attend this very fun event.

Westminster Bridge, crossing the River Thames. As I started sketching this, the rain came down, so I moved into the little tunnel next to the bridge (which I had never seen before; is it new?) and sketched from there. Eventually the rain stopped. Then started again, then stopped. It was one of those days. There is a very famous clock tower on the other side of the river. I like bridges. I even bought a book about bridges while I was back. In fact I spent a lot of time in bookshops in London. Bookshops are the best. Anyway, I had planned to sketch a lot more bridges in London but you know it is. Maybe that is the next sketchcrawl I organize? Those curves were not easy to capture with absolute mathematical perfection while stood against the wall in a damp tunnel with wet people shuffling by. But here it is, Westminster Bridge, painted green because the seat in the House of Commons are green (Lambeth Bridge further down is red because the House of Lords has red seats). It was opened in 1862 and Wordsworth wrote a sonnet about it.

Borough Market is great. It may be one of my favourite markets. On this one Saturday morning, I took the train down to London Bridge station and marched right over to my favourite sandwich stand, lovely chicken served by the same guy with the amiable smile. You always get a lollipop too, well I do anyway. But as I now like sketching iconic markets (hey this is still a new thing, but after Barcelona’s La Boqueria last year, San Francisco’ Ferry Building and of course, er, Davis Farmer’s Market, I needed to sketch the market under the railway arches, with all its goats-cheese middle-class craft-beer tourist-trail glory. I stood and sketched the scene above, next to the Globe pub. There’s been a market here, on and off, since the eleventh century (not really surprising in the least given that London Bridge and the gates of the City and all the docks and the Pool of London were like, right there). Apparently it was abolished in the 1750s by an Act of Parliament due to ‘traffic congestion’ which let’s face it Borough Market, don’t make things up. Cars weren’t even invented for another hundred and fifty years, so stick to the facts, Borough Market. Anyway it came back and thrives today, a fun and colourful spot to be on a Saturday morning. I had a few hours to sketch before heading off to take my son to his first Spurs game at White Hart Lane.
I sketched the scene above from stoney Street, right on the other side of the market. It was pretty crowded as I walked through. That huge great big triangular glass tower is the Shard, tallest builidn gin Europe. One of those buildings you look at in its development phase and its like, oooh, hmmm yeah, yeah that’s different, and then when its built its like, “take a photo from this angle! Ooh and this angle! Ooooh and this old church in it as well, juxtaposition of the old and the new!” (By the way, never, ever utter that phrase in my presence, ever.) And now it’s like, er, London did you see this thing? You do know you can’t just get rid of it when you’re bored of it? It’s like a big glass Orthanc, or whatever that tower was called in Mordor, ‘Eduard Balladur’ or something. Or maybe the Ministry of Truth. It dominates proceedings. Look London its things like this that become symbols of the city in the long run. Is this what London is now? A big, sharp glass behemoth standing high above everything else like an oligarch’s shiny fantasy? I wouldn’t be surprised if the sides actually turn into a V-style TV screen so that some benevolent rich dictator can tell us how happy we are, how contented we are, and to destroy Emmanuel Goldstein. Yeah, not sure I like the Shard all that much, but we have it now. We need another, somewhere else in London, just as a counterweight. But I do like Borough Market.

And here is the late-night hand-drawn map. The odd thick lines are traintracks, isn’t it obvious, and I foolishly decided to add some buildings before deciding that was quite pointless. Anyway, this shows where I sketched. I had a job interview down here once, about a decade ago, at the Institute of Linguists. I wished I’d gotten it, because I always wanted to be coming down here every day (I had been working in Finchley, nice place but this was nearer to the Thames) . I never did, and then I moved to America. Ok, enough life story. More London sketches to come.

Since returning from London – and I have plenty more sketches yet to post – my sketching regularity has fallen off somewhat. This often happens after a big trip, but I’ve also been filling my lunchtimes reading Marvel comics (Marvel Unlimited, dudes), and the rest of my time coaching my son’s soccer team, which also includes planning training, designing the team badge, making stickers, creating a record of the kits worn by all the other teams, and all of that fun stuff. After London, sketching more panoramas of 2nd Street just doesn’t hold the same appeal right now. However, I did get out of the house one evening to go down to Art-Is-Davis on D Street for a special party hosted by the resident artists there, to mark the end of their time at the artist’s co-operative. I was invited by one of them, my friend and fellow artist Dori Marshall, and I got to speak to many Davis artists I hadn’t met in a while, and some I was meeting for the first time. It was a nice evening, and there was a band outside in the little courtyard behind the building. the band were called the Lightning Boltz, and they were really good. I’ve said it before I do love to have live music when I’m sketching, it adds to the whole rhythm. It was also extremely dark – I sketched this in almost total darkness, in a shadow next to the building. I couldn’t really tell one colour from the next so it was guesswork, but pretty informed guesswork (I know which paint is where in my paintbox after all). This didn’t take me long, a couple of songs at most. The band liked it when I showed it to them afterwards, but I realised the guy in the middle has a quite different beard than I drew! Well, that’s my eyesight in the dark.

More London… After a morning spent mooching around Greenwich (and re-enacting scenes from Thor 2 with my son) I had some time to do more panorama sketching in central London, and I chose to look around the Covent Garden are for just the right spot. I found it on the corner of Bow Street, Russell Street and Wellington Street, sloping down towards Strand and the Thames. This is a colourful bustling part of central London, but not too busy in the Oxford Circus sense. Tourists ambled here and there – hither and thither if you like – occasionally stopping to ask me for directions (“um, sorry can’t remember London as well as I used to…but here’s a handy map!”). Yes that object on the left of the picture with the yellow top is a very handy map of the area, there are lots of those around London now which is very helpful. Bow Street always conjures up thoughts of London’s first professional police force, the famous “Bow Street Runners”. Across the way you can make out the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is currently playing. It’s supposed to be one of London’s most haunted theatres, haunted by a ghostly ‘Man In Grey’. Maybe it’s John Major. Russell Street, crossing over to the right, leads up to Covent Garden, land of Annoying Street Performers. Annoying Street Performers – in fact any street performer who requires you to clear a massive space in a crowded public area and walk around their sacred space while they jump about to awful music simply in the name of ‘spectacle’, and then passes around some sort of bucket expecting you to contribute actual money to fund their nonsense – are not my favourite things about big cities (you’d never guess). My own public performance these days consists of standing for two and a half hours drawing at an unusual angle into a Moleskine. Here are some in-progress shots…

I do love standing and sketching panoramas, but they really do take a long time. I had to add the colour when I got home. I had to stop after that two and a half hour mark because I needed to go home for dinner, so I had less time to look around the shops. I never got to Stanford’s, one of my favourite shops in London growing up (they specialize in MAPS), but I did find the new Moleskine store which was fun (I stamped the back of my current Moley with their little London stamps). A little pricey, but they had a lot of really cool stuff. I’m using the newer ‘art plus’ version of the watercolour Moleskine, which I’m not enjoying as much as the twelve previous watercolour Moleskines I have filled. The new paper is…different. Still, I’ll fill it! Here is a map of the area, showing where I stood and sketched,

Right now, I have a couple of my sketches in the Pence Gallery’s 2014 Art Auction, an annual event that supports the gallery and consists of a silent auction throughout September and a Gala Event with a live auction, taking place this Saturday September 20th. I’ve been fortunate enough to take part in the past three years, and am a big fan of the gallery and how it promotes local art. The pieces I have in it this year are my sketches of Piccadilly Circus (drawn on location early one morning in London) and my most recent Farmer’s Market sketch, sketched one busy Wednesday evening earlier in the summer. I’ll be going again on Saturday and will probably bring my sketchbook with me (for a change, eh), so if you see me, do say hello! And check out the lovely work of our Davis artists.